Google dumps diversity goals as US President Donald Trump shakes up DEI agenda

Google will no longer use hiring goals to boost workforce diversity as the company continues to evaluate its diversity, equity and inclusion practices in the wake of President Donald Trump’s executive orders, according to an email to employees.

In the email, Fiona Cicconi, the company’s chief people officer, wrote that the company has “always been committed to creating a workplace where we hire the best people wherever we operate, create an environment where everyone can thrive, and treat everyone fairly”.

But she added that the company, a federal contractor, has to review its programs in light of recent court decisions as well as Mr Trump’s orders that condition government contracts on companies’ certification that they do not run diversity programs that violate federal anti-discrimination laws.

In 2020, Google set “aspirational hiring goals” to improve representation, Ms Cicconi noted, “but in the future we will no longer have aspirational goals”.

The company will “closely and carefully” evaluate other programs, trainings and initiatives and “update them as needed — including those that raise risk, or that aren’t as impactful as we’d hoped”, Ms Cicconi said. That said, Google will continue to run its employee-resource groups, she noted.

The changes at Google come as a growing number of top companies pull back on their DEI programs, including Meta, Walmart and McDonald’s.

Many of these changes had been under way in response to the Supreme Court’s June 2023 decision overturning affirmative action in university admissions and the dozens of lawsuits that followed. But the push has come into sharper focus since Mr Trump, in the first days of his second term, issued a pair of sweeping executive orders aimed at quashing DEI in the federal government, the private sector and academia.

Google and other big tech companies have for years pledged to increase the diversity of their workforces, but liberal activists have accused them of not backing up that talk with action. According to its 2024 diversity report, about 33 per cent of Google’s US employees were women, 5.7 per cent of its employees were Black, and 7.5 percent were Latino.

“We’re committed to creating a workplace where all our employees can succeed and have equal opportunities, and over the last year we’ve been reviewing our programs designed to help us get there,” Google said in a statement.

“We’ve updated our 10-k language to reflect this, and as a federal contractor, our teams are also evaluating changes required following recent court decisions and executive orders on this topic.”

A Google employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their job said that it was “disappointing to see us cave to pressure”.

The richest companies on the planet have failed to hire a workforce that looks like the rest of the world, the person said. “Yet another example of how these companies really do prove that it’s just capitalism after all.”